... and so are her spiritual descendants, people like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho, women sharp enough and shrewd enough to wade into the cultural scrapheap that is gender and recycle all the trashy signifiers they find there for laughs.

Williams is different, Trebay says, because she's a talk show host.

Like a kooky media divinity, a god in a comic book myth, Williams, 45, is permeable, superpotent and with no observable boundaries. She performs tricks on the air that involve her surgically amplified bosom. She suggests to guests like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, the confrontational star of “The Apprentice,” that she look into facial fillers to correct the marionette lines that frame her stiff, practiced smile. She vows to keep her audience up to date on her vaginal toning. She cries, but then on television lately it’s hard to shut off the waterworks.

“You just have the audacity and the unmitigated gall to say what you think and let the chips fall where they may,” Williams said.

Nice. But I'm more interested in the general idea of the female female impersonator. The first person who sprang to mind for me is Dolly Parton. And Marilyn Monroe. And then Courtney Love, Madonna, Lady Gaga.

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and so are her spiritual descendants, people like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho, women sharp enough and shrewd enough to wade into the cultural scrapheap that is gender and recycle all the trashy signifiers they find there for laughs.

...excepting the fact that Margaret Cho isn't funny in the least. Maybe she was way back when (before her failed show), but now her stand-up is nothing but a bitchfest about how everyone hates her because she's fat and oriental. Even her set pieces, like impersonations of her English-challanged mother, are sixth-grade lunch room fare at best.

Honestly...she's like a short, heavy, unfunny version of Henry Rollins (who was brilliant in his "Sons Of Anarchy" role recently, btw)...without the pithy cultural observations or relevance to anything or anyone but herself.

Granted, I understand comedy is like music in the sense it's a personal taste with no inherent right or wrong. Except in the case of Margaret Cho...she's just wrong.

What a great way of thinking of Phyllis Diller. She could be really funny at her best, but as time went on I found her "act" tiring. I liked her earlier when it was less over the top.

In some way all comedians are impersonators. They are clowns who make the fact that they are wearing a mask obvious. If the mask reflects some of their real personality so much the better. But it has to be obviously a mask. A dramatic actor can and usually should get lost in the role and hide the fact that he or she is wearing a mask. A comedian always shows the greasepaint.

You know, it's not often that I can say that the very concept of a thread on Althouse disgusts me. This one manages it.

They are women with a funny or exaggerated image. Nobody goes around telling Robin Williams that he's a hyperactive adult hyperactive adult impersonator, but somehow that's okay with women who act funny? Pah.